When I patch one of my Linux systems or add new software, 99 times out of 100 I use a modern program like the Ubuntu’s Software Center or Linux Mint’s Software Manager. But there are times, especially when I’m working with a system that needs automated updates using cron or with a remote system via ssh or telnet, that I need to use a good, old-fashioned command line tool—and you will too. So, for times like those, it helps to keep the shell commands in mind.

Desktop

In case you haven’t noticed, after lukewarm reception for its Chrome OS in the market, Google is doubling down on its efforts to gain acceptance for the operating system. And maybe the effort can still be successful. After all, hasn’t Google steered the Android mobile OS to remarkable success in a short period of time? Here are some of the latest assessments of Google’s chances to build a strong user base for Chrome OS despite lackluster user enthusiasm so far.

Server

While worldwide expenditures on server hardware declined in the first quarter, server unit shipments actually increased, led by double-digit growth in Linux-based systems. HP, IBM, and Dell were the dominant players, according to two reports released in the last week.

Last month’s news that IBM would be pushing out Linux-on-Power based servers may very well have given you a sense of been-there-done-that, but the new focus on IBM’s Power architecture is giving Big Blue another shot at taking on the Linux on x86 sector.

The question is, will the shot hit its big data target? Or are the new PowerLinux systems too expensive for their intended markets?

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

Linus Torvalds published the first Linux 3.5 release candidate on Saturday night, although the official release email wasn’t sent until Sunday afternoon. As usual, the first RC of the new kernel version signals the end of the merge window phase at the beginning of the development cycle, during which nearly all of the major changes are made. Aside from a few stragglers, the function set Linux 3.5-rc1 offers should be almost identical to the one in the 3.5 kernel, which is expected to be released in late July or early August.

Linus Torvalds kicked off the latest kernel release cycle late Saturday night with the first release candidate for the Linux 3.5 kernel. The release comes just two short weeks after Linux 3.4 was officially released.

Graphics Stack

Users of Linux distributions with the latest versions of the Linux kernel and X.org’s X Server will in future only be able to use the 2000, 3000 and 4000 series of Radeon HD graphics hardware with open source drivers. This is because version 12.4 of AMD’s proprietary Linux graphics driver Catalyst (fglrx) doesn’t work with X Server 1.12, which was released in March. Although the recently published beta of Catalyst 12.6 is supposed to fix this, while also supporting Linux kernel 3.3 officially, it was announced in April that this version only works with the Radeon HD models from the 5000, 6000 and 7000 series, which are compatible with DirectX 11. This is the case for both Linux and Windows.

Screenshots are not only useful for tech bloggers to showcase cool apps, they’re also an integral component of most of the web-based tutorials. Following the ‘show don’t tell’ technique that many writers swear by, tech bloggers lean on the demonstrative power of screenshots to review the latest applications. Tutorial writers too use these screenshots, and sometimes, they edit them so as to point out particular details about the application. Whatever be the case, taking screenshots takes time, and in many cases, it also demands a certain amount of effort from the user as you need to capture aspects of the app in action.

Games

Previously I’ve mooted an obstacle preventing Linux adoption is the need for more big game titles, rather than productivity apps. This week, in the wake of its Humble Indie Bundle debut, Tim Schafer explains what porting Psychonauts to Linux was like.

Love your Linux games, but hate painful installs? Ubuntu maker Canonical understands, and has kicked the usual, less snappy, procedure to the curb creating a new approach for the Humble Indie Bundle. The company already expanded Linux gaming, recently adding EA titles to its Ubuntu Software Center, and now you can download the Humble quintet from there as a single file, and install it in one go. In true open source style, you can pick the price you’d like to pay at Humble’s site and even juggle how that sum is distributed to the games’ developers and charities. So with the install obstacle gone, trundle on past the break and see if the promo video seals the deal.

Lunduke claims the only way he could release his software under the GPL is if he was making at least $4,000 per month in subscriptions, a sum which (according to him) is below what he’s currently making by selling the applications individually. The idea that Lunduke is making north of $4,000 per month via one time purchases of games like a Linux distro simulator is already difficult to believe, but if true, shows the most glaring omission of logic in this entire project.

It was at the end of January that Michael Simms, the founder and original CEO of Linux Game Publishing had stepped down after suffering burn out and not much coming out of the company in recent years. Taking over Linux Game Publishing was Clive Crous. Four months ago from yesterday, Clive blogged about the new work and his “great plans for Linux Game Publishing.”

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

The KDE team has announced the release of KDE 4.9 Beta1. This release brings renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.

KDE e.V. has responded to the United Kingdom Open Standards Consultation on behalf of KDE, one of the largest and most influential Free Software communities world-wide with thousands of volunteer contributors and countless users. Open Standards align with the goals of the KDE Community, especially with regards to digital freedom and contributions to the common good, while patent mania and malicious licensing terms threaten KDE and other Free Software projects.

The first beta of what will become KDE 4.9 was released yesterday, just four day past due date. After the usual round of testing and more pre-stable releases, the final, stable version of KDE 4.9 should hit the proverbial shelves early August 2012. The complete release schedule is available here.

The schedule for Akademy Workshops and Birds of a Feather sessions (BoFs) is available for registration. Organized in the Unconference style, people attending Akademy can select the preferred times and locations for topics they will lead.

GNOME Desktop

There is good news for Debian Sid users. “The final bits of GNOME 3.4 have landed and if all looks as good as it does now, they should migrate to wheezy in about a week,” posts Jordi Mallach on his blog.

When Linus Torvalds sneezes, the Linux world catches the cold. We often find Linus complaining about Gnome, no surprises you will complain about the flaws in the technology you use and not about the one you never touch. But when he says something it carries a lot of weight as he shares his experience as a user and not the father of Linux. His rants are also important as it gives voice to thousands of users who share the same plight but no one listens to their problem. So, what irked Linus this time?

Red Hat employee and member of the GNOME foundation Cosimo Cecchi, explained yesterday through his blog, the various improvements that the GTK 3.4 release brought for the GNOME users, and the work that is being done on the next 3.6 release.

The days that Linux were thought of as complicated are over. If you don’t believe that, realize that Ubuntu for instance, has reached 20 million active users. There are even Linux distributions aimed for children, which is great news since that means your child might be on his or her way to gaining exposure to Linux as a simplified operating system as well as exposure to healthier games and applications.

New Releases

The Neptune team is proud to announce the release of Neptune 2.5.
This release comes with Kernel 3.3.4 with lots of patches and drivers. As usual and for the last time we ship two official variants: 1. Full Edition with KDE 4.8.3 and 2. our Minimal Edition with LXDE and E17.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Mageia began its life not so long ago by being a community fork of the Mandriva Linux distribution. The future of Mandriva, as a company, has been in question for years prompting several developers and users to push for an independent, community-oriented distro. The first release of Mageia, version 1, got off to a fairly good start. It didn’t vary much technologically from Mandriva and felt a bit like a test run, as though the developers were making sure all the proper infrastructure was in place.

Fedora

Fedora is always loaded with new technologies, and the new Fedora 17 release has the most ever. Get a head start on what’s going to appear in Red Hat Enterprise Linux by grabbing a copy of the new Beefy Miracle.

Those of us using GNU/Linux have probably heard about the UEFI Secure Boot scheme and how it demonstrates Microsoft’s strong grasp on PC hardware vendors. If you are not quite sure what UEFI Secure Boot is yet, I highly advise reading up on it as new PCs will begin to have this feature enabled by default in the near future to comply with Microsoft’s requirements for Windows 8. Yes, a software company is controlling hardware companies. Luckily though, the feature can be disabled so that we will still be able to install GNU/Linux on the same x86 hardware. Matthew Garrett from Red Hat summarizes the UEFI Secure Boot issue on his blog.

Debian Family

Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the Debian Edu and Skolelinux mailing list. He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the Debian Edu Squeeze version.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

I got burned by Ubuntu again this morning – as if I needed to be reminded why I dislike it so much. I have a number of computers around here, and they all have a moderately complicated multi-boot configuration. Each of them has multiple Linux distributions installed, and most of them have some sort of Windows as well. I always use the openSuSE Legacy GRUB bootloader. The overall result is that it does what I want, and it’s reliable. At least, it was reliable until I installed some Ubuntu updates this morning.

Rhythmbox 2.97 has been released a couple of days ago, bringing a new, more compact header layout which includes album art by default, along with a new podcast subscription interface and other minor new features and bug fixes.

As if there wasn’t reason enough to be a fan of Canonical and its Ubuntu flavor of Linux (Unity aside), the company announced that it has joined forces with the Humble Indie Bundle (HIB) to both raise awareness of the ability to play high quality games on the free platform as well as raise money for some awesome causes. Starting with this latest bundle of independent DRM-free games, Ubuntu users have a streamlined installation process that utilizes the Ubuntu Software Center in conjunction with the HIB purchasing engine to make it easier than ever before to download and install the games being offered. For those of you who are avid fans of supporting both the open-source movement and independent development houses this is a win-win scenario!

The fine folks over at Canonical have been hard at work on a mobile version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distro, and have announced that the final build will be making its way to smartphones later this year or early next year. Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth would not provide a specific date to PC World, instead indicating that announcements would likely be coming later this year.

Flavours and Variants

Microsoft has shortly released the consumer preview of its flag ship operating system, Windows 8, that is evidently re-skinned to better suit touch-screen devices. Unfortunately, in attempting to revamp the OS, Microsoft has done some serious damages to it’s self and more importantly to the end-users. The post compares Windows8 to Linux Mint 13.

Mint is a relative of Ubuntu, but don’t let that make you think it’s a recycled Ubuntu distro. Think of Linux Mint 13 as a better OS with all the good stuff that made Ubuntu so popular so fast and none of the stuff that dragged it down in recent releases. Longtime Linux users and newcomers alike will not be disappointed with Mint’s latest version.

Back in February of this year, Raspberry Pi began taking orders for $35 desktop PCs. The Ultra Low-cost PC (ULPC) is just a circuit board and requires you to supply your own storage media, micro USB charger (for power), display, keyboard, and mouse. Though many people have expressed interest in this little product, there’s still no easy was to house it.

The Raspberry Pi received an extraordinary amount of pre-launch coverage. It truly went viral with major news corporations such as the BBC giving extensive coverage. Not without reason, it is groundbreaking to have a small capable computer retailing at less than the price of a new console game. There have been a number of ventures that have tried to produce a cheap computer such as a laptop and a tablet but which never materialised at these price points. Nothing comes close to the Raspberry Pi in terms of affordability, which is even more important in the current economic climate. Producing a PC capable of running Linux, Quake III-quality games, and 1080p video is worthy of praise.

Phones

Android

Another Android phone maker is set to unveil a UI overlay sitting atop Google’s mobile operating system. This time it’s Huawei. Its Sense/TouchWiz competitor will be called Emotion UI and is going to arrive in July.

In its latest statistics on the market penetration of the various iterations of the Android mobile operating system, Google has revealed that Ice Cream Sandwich could now be found in up to 7.1% of all Android devices. In comparison, data released last month showed that Ice Cream Sandwich only ran 4.9% of the entire population of Android devices.

Kotlin, one of the newer alternatives to Java that runs on the Java Virtual Machine, has reached its second milestone and can now run on Android. The open source language is being developed by JetBrains, developers of the IntelliJ IDEA IDE. Kotlin offers the ability not only to compile to Java byte code but also to JavaScript. Announced in July 2011 and open sourced in February, Kotlin is working past a set of milestone targets to become a production ready language.

Last month I reported that Motorola Droid Razr and Razr Maxx users might get to taste the sweetness of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich as soon as May 21, while Xoom 3G and 4G owners seemed stuck in Honeycomb thanks to an upgrade holding pattern for the foreseeable future.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

In addition to Intel, Shuttle has also been aggressively entering the education market with its e-backpack solution. Shuttle’s 8-inch V-series V08CN01 tablet PC features Nvidia’s Tegra 2 and Android, while weighing only 570g.

Tablets are taking over the portable-computing market, but that doesn’t mean the netbooks that they’ve replaced are useless. It’s possible to jam the processing power and battery life of most netbook models into a smaller, touchscreen-equipped package. The project is very straightforward: Remove a few parts, add a touchscreen overlay (about $80; MyDigitalDiscount), reseal the device in its new tablet form, install a driver, and calibrate the screen. And if you use an old netbook you have lying around (or buy a used one), it costs a fraction of the price of a new tablet.

If you like the look of the Asus Transformer AiO but don’t care about the portability factor, ViewSonic’s Android Smart Display VCD22 may be of interest — it’s a 22-inch 1080p Android 4.0 machine with an all-in-one form factor that you’re unlikely to want to use on your lap. There’s a 1GHz dual-core processor inside, along with 1GB RAM, and it seemed to back up the software smoothly enough with impressively speedy touch response.

Even as Facebook continues making headlines in the wake of its IPO and a precipitous drop in its share price, the company has made a big contribution to open source. Not everyone realizes that Facebook is built on open source technology, and it has released many components to the open source community before. Now, as Jordan DeLong explains in an extensive post, the company has released a reusable C++ library of components called Folly.

Revolution Analytics debuted today a major upgrade of its R Enterprise platform for handling big data. R Enterprise 6.0, which like its predecessor is based on the open source R statistics language, is designed to give enterprises better ways of handling big data and discover “hidden correlations” in data to transform businesses, the company said in a [...]

Yes, a VM install of Mageia 1 with Evolution 2.32.2 will still send e-mail via our hosted mail SMTP server. Yes, Thunderbird will send e-mail via our hosted mail SMTP server. Yes, every other e-mail application I have tried will send e-mail via our hosted mail SMTP server. But not Evolution 3.4.x in Mageia 2, which is what I want to use since I settled on Evolution after abandoning Kontact + Kmail many moons ago. Again, I am considering yet another e-mail application switch due to a broken e-mail application following an upgrade. (Broken for me! I don’t care if it “works” for you!) I do not care to go back to KDE’s Kmail since my experience with that breaking following upgrades was just as problematic. My requirements are still the same as last time:

Events

I’ve been an open source and free culture advocate for more than half a decade. I’ve used open source operating systems and applications on my computers and mobile devices for nearly as long. I’ve contributed to open source documentation efforts. I’ve organized a university event to promote the principles of open source in college. And I’ve been writing for opensource.com.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

Exactly as the company promised it would early last year, Mozilla is proceeding full steam ahead with its rapid release cycle for the Firefox browser. Version 13 of Firefox first arrived in a beta version in April, adding a number of notable features. Now, version 13 is available (although it officially launches tomorrow). Here is what’s under the hood.

Complete release notes for Firefox 13 are available here, and you can download the new version here.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

As enterprises consider alternatives to Microsoft Office in the cloud era, Google is zipping along with Enterprise Apps and now QuickOffice and IBM has IBM Docs in beta but all is fairly quiet on the OpenOffice mobile/cloud front. Xform Computing is one developer trying to take OpenOffice to the mobile masses.

While Microsoft is planning to bring its Office suite to Android and iOS (after repeatedly failed attempts in mobile OS market and sinking Nokia’s boat), Google has acquired QuickOffice, the best mobile office suite for Android and iOS devices. With this acquisition, Google now has an off-line office suite for Android and iOS to compete with Microsoft’s Office.

Project Releases

Obnam, “a snapshotting, de-duplicating, encrypting backup program” has been released by its developer, Lars Wirzenius. The application has been in development since 2006 when Wirzenius decided that he could not find a backup application which met all his demands, despite finding various applications with one or two of his requirements.

Licensing

An announcement was made on May 16th, 2012, regarding an agreement between the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs and 3M to create a public use version of the HDD, called HDD Access, which will be available for download from the HDD Access website later this year. Digg this article

Standards/Consortia

However, PCs based on Windows 8 are not expected to adopt entry-level pricing so the initial target markets will be developed economies where purchasing power is strong and users appreciate product innovation. Wang pointed to North America as being the key market, stating that Windows 8 needs to be as successful as Apple in the higher-end of the PC market.

Finance

Armageddon was threatening the financial system on Wednesday, September 17, 2008. The largest bankruptcy in American history, that of investment bank Lehman Brothers on Monday, September 15, had roiled global markets, accelerating the stupendous decline in values of every possible investment vehicle– common stocks, corporate bonds, real estate, commodities like oil, copper and gold, private equity and hedge funds alike. In the midst of the chaos Merrill Lynch, the firm that had brought Wall Street to Main Street, was absorbed in a shotgun marriage by Bank of America.

Wall Street has good reason to be rattled by the news that Goldman Sachs laid off senior personnel, including managing directors, last week. It is likely the beginning of a new kind of deleveraging that will occur at every major Wall Street firm.

It’s well known that Wall Street has been forced by markets and regulators to delever in the wake of the financial crisis. For the most part, this has been a matter of financial deleveraging: reducing debt to capital ratios, reducing dependence on short-term debt, reducing compensation (especially bonuses) to revenue ratios.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

A paid canvasser supporting Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker before the recall election has been implicated in a “voter fraud” allegation. But despite claims by Walker and his allies, there is still no evidence of a systemic effort to fraudulently change election outcomes.

The lunacy of the EPO with its patent maximalism will likely go unchecked (and uncorrected) if Battistelli gets his way and turns the EPO into another SIPO (Croatian in the human rights sense and Chinese in the quality sense)

Another long installment in a multi-part series about UPC at times of post-truth Battistelli-led EPO, which pays the media to repeat the lies and pretend that the UPC is inevitable so as to compel politicians to welcome it regardless of desirability and practicability

Implementing yet more of his terrible ideas and so-called 'reforms', Battistelli seems to be racing to the bottom of everything (patent quality, staff experience, labour rights, working conditions, access to justice etc.)

"Good for trolls" is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

Microsoft's continued fascination with and participation in the effort to undermine Alice so as to make software patents, which the company uses to blackmail GNU/Linux vendors, widely acceptable and applicable again